Re: If only....

let's also stop calling this "piracy" - which simply plays into the emotional argument framing people as blackhearted evildoers - and call it "unauthorised copying".

most of this copying /does not/ result in the downloaders making a profit by reselling - people are simply responding to the egregious pricing by old-world distributors who want to maintain gross revenue and rely on distorting markets through litigation and lobbying.

Re: Not really 1c the way Public Cloud means it...

Pricing is based on a server starter pack + capacity model, but can be as low or lower than 0.1c /gb/month for the software component based on the fact you get 4x storage nodes in the basic pack. The higher density your storage servers, the lower the per-gb price.

where's the applications?

in terms of *private* cloud - i.e., changing your internal datacenter to use cloud concepts like policy-driven deployment, automation, templating and self-service, I'd argue a lot of enterprises _are_ lacking the operational maturity needed to fully realise the benefits (http://pwl-n-stuff.blogspot.com/2014/06/why-isn-cloud-taking-off.html). in particular, where the environments are outsourced, the big service providers have little incentive to make it easier to get things done with, e.g. self-service, if their financial model is based on getting lots of $ for performing additional but simple tasks that were left out of the outsource contract.

on the other side, though - where are the *enterprise* applications that support/require/capitalise on a cloud-type infrastructure? until they become more pervasive, there's less impetus for enterprises to adopt that kind of infrastructure & the complexity it entails. (http://pwl-n-stuff.blogspot.com/2014/07/cloud-high-availability-antifragility.html)

good to see them playing catch-up

so they're offering samba-based windows domain integration & linux containers, have included XFS without charging extra like they used to, and have finally made it to a 3.x kernel. all stuff SUSE did years ago. congrats.

looks like they're also trailing on the btrfs front - although at least the tech preview means users will have a *chance* to include snapshots & so on, so long as they don't mind not having full support. i wonder if it's integrated into the system management tools yet, like it is in SUSE?

Re: Linux is the answer

The scalability discussion is no longer relevant.

HP's "Kraken" server is a single-system-image machine with up to 240cores and 12TB of RAM (24TB once bigger memory modules are available). It's designed to run SAP HANA, and that's developed on and only available on SUSE Linux.

Re: Looks attractive...

Vanilla OpenStack can be painful to set up, that's why SUSE Cloud also includes the Crowbar project mentioned in the article: basic infrastructure nodes (control, storage, etc) set up in ~20min; new servers can be just plugged into the network to be automagically discovered & allocated to roles.

OpenStack in general is targeted at public & private cloud infrastructure: last user survey had about 65% of respondents doing private. It also has the advantage of being hypervisor-agnostic: so you don't have to waste valuable vsphere licenses on basic stuff that can be satisfied with xen or kvm on linux.

not unexpected

this was always going to happen.

remember how this started out? Labor said "we're going to build this fabbo network", Abbot then immediately countered (without talking to anyone who had a clue) with "that's a bad plan, because, Labor bad".

from that point on, Turnbull was painted into a corner. I think it's pretty clear that to him, the concept of FTTP (implementation notwithstanding) was always going to be the preferable solution - but due to Australian politics he couldn't immediately come out & say that - he had to support the party line or else end up not being in any position to change it.

Instead he has been slowly slowly manoeuvring away from the original "NBN bad" towards one where universal broadband is acceptable. eventually once the coalition won government, he was able to implement "a review", which is often political-speak for "make it look like we're going to make sweeping changes, but instead take the heat off for a bit, while we work out a way to do the thing that we know is right, but that we have previously argued against for no good reason".

his recent comments hint that he's confident that they've found some technical loophole that allows fttp in a way that is "better" than the previous proposal - or at least a way to package it in enough gobbledigook to make it seem that way to the mainstream.

the next phase will be the announcement of the review's findings, indicating that there will be mostly fttp possible due to something special that the Labor govt "ignored", or something like that.

Australian politics as normal - at least Turnbull seems interested in the subject.

Re: leave my SIM alone!!!

not requiring a physical sim means that you could easily have multiple operators for your phone without having to fiddle about swapping little bits of plastic. you could then select from a menu who you want to use at a given point in time, maybe have different networks for voice vs data, have one handset for work and personal numbers, etc. it also means you could order an international account *before* you arrive in a country & have it activate the moment you step off the plane (no need to find somethere that sells the right-sized piece of plastic to fit in your device).

also, if you have a subscription with a network operator, you should then be able to use any device simply by authenticating yourself: dropped your phone in the ocean? no problem, grab the old handset in your cupboard, reactivate it & your old number is still available to you. or add your own number to your friend's hadset for a while so people can still contact you on the trip back from the beach.

preporly executed this seems like a great idea (but then, you can say that about a lot of things...)

Re: Munich doesn't pay more. It uses Linux and open source

- "non geeks" use the functions of the computer they've been shown. windows or linux will be equally confusing to them, so why not use the one with lower licensing costs?

- in over 20 years of working life, i've yet to see *anyone* be sent on training for microsoft office, including the many iterations where the user interface changed radically. the "training" rationale is a furphy.

- if you've got a modern user productivity environment, then everyone should be using standard-based web apps, and the desktop OS is irrelevant. granted this is more of an aspiration than a reality, but people are slowed being dragged into the 20th century [sic].

vendor view

Re: Why - Oh Why waste so much money when Open Office & LibreOffice are free?

MS office skills? really?

retraining? really?

how much training actually happened when office 2007 came out & confused the hell out of everyone with its changed user interface? the swearing & cursing around the place went on for years, but no-one got trained. everyone's just expected to know.

here's the rub: if you're not spending $$$ on the software, you *can* afford to train people and they might (gasp) become more productive!

merry go round

i hereby predict & coin the "IT reaggregation" trend of 2017-2020, where organisations "Precipitate" data and apps back from the cloud into central systems. the motivation will be partly security, but mostly for speed of service, efficient interaction of the widely-dispersed business apps & data, and improved control of the information environment for user groups frustrated with the huge number of disparate saas providers.